[Harp-L] Subject: Jason Ricci @ BluesWax Ezine- (Part Two) - Part One in Toto

[EGS1217@xxxxxxx]

Hi Fernando:  I'm not criticizing - any information about  Jason is good
stuff, but I've written to the author asking permission  to post the articles.
 Here's the editor's response (I also have  his contact information for
anyone who might wish to write to him directly or to  sign up with BluesWax.
The articles and other music information are great.) I'll  post Part Two next
week.

Elizabeth


"Elizabeth, I appreciate you asking. We don't appreciate people stealing
our work. We allow repostings with permission and proper  citation. If you
would please include something like": "This article was  originally published
in BluesWax, the world's largest subscribed Blues  publication. It is
reposted with permission. Please do not circulate, copy, or  otherwise forward
this information without permission. All copyrights reserved  by Visionation,
Ltd. 2009. You may subscribe to BluesWax at _www.blueswax.com_
(http://www.blueswax.com/) . It is free, we never send  anything else or share reader
information, just the Blues in your box every  Thursday."

Also,  please do not publish it until after the week of publication.
Specifically,  please do not publish Part One until Thursday, June 4; Part Two
until Thursday,  June 11; and Part Three until June 18. Thanks for you courtesy
and  consideration.
Chip  Eagle

So here is the first part of the Interview with Jason from last week's
BluesWax Ezine by Stacy A. Jeffress:


BluesWax Sittin' In With
Jason Ricci
Blues Ambassador to  The Next Generation
By Stacy A.  Jeffress
Editor's Note: As  president of the Northeast Blues Society, I would always
tell the artists we  sent to The Blues Foundation's International Blues
Challenge that being in the  contest is almost as important as winning. I feel
the same about the Blues Music  Awards. This year Billy Gibson won Blues
Harmonica Player of the Year,  and he deserves it if for no other reason than
his enthusiasm and his absolute  joy of performing. That said, Jason Ricci,
who was nominated in the same  category, is changing the definition of Blues
harmonica in a way arguably as  profound as Jimi Hendrix's voice on guitar
did 42 years ago. In doing so,  Ricci is enlisting new, often younger, fans
to the base audience, and he's doing  that from a position that throws out
all the rules of stereotypes. Stacy  Jeffress' interview with Ricci offers
amazing insight, and Ricci's bald honesty  in his answers is what I would
expect from him because it mirrors his art. The  conversation between Jeffress
and Ricci makes for exciting and important  reading.


Photo By Joe Rosen
I became a fan of harmonica sensation Jason Ricci before  having heard any
of his music. Ricci's tale of an identity crisis generated by  his struggle
to fit into the African-American Blues tradition and his subsequent
immersion into, and recovery from, substance addiction is compelling.
The 34-year-old harmonica sensation was a nominee for the  2009 Blues Music
Award for harmonica player of the year. He transcended the dark  times and
found his own musical voice with his band, New Blood, which  expresses
itself through Jazz- and Punk-inspired riffs but always comes home to  the Blues.
Blues traditionalists may not know how to take some of Ricci's music,  but
considering the journey he's taken to get here, we can trust Ricci to be our
 tour guide through new musical territory and to return us home safely,
enriched  by the experience.
Jason's 2007 release, Rocket Number 9 on Eclecto  Groove Records (a
division of Delta Groove), explored sounds from the sweet and  sublime "Sonja" to
the irresistible swing of "The Blow Zone Layer" and then  propelled us past
the pull of Earth's gravity on the title track. This is not  your grandma's
Blues, but you might catch her tapping her foot to the beat.
Generous by nature, as evidenced by the numerous  instructional videos he
has posted on YouTube, Ricci recently spent two hours on  the phone with me.
Stacy Jeffress for BluesWax: Tell me about your  YouTube videos. I am
fascinated by the amount of time you spend sharing your  knowledge and love of
your instrument with other folks.
Jason Ricci: It's really interesting that was the  first question you
picked. I think that the emergence of YouTube as a form of  instruction is
fascinating, and the amount of people in all genres like  athletics and art and
music and cooking that have gotten fame by doing nothing  besides YouTube. I
intended to reach a broader audience by making those videos.  We already had
videos of the band up playing, and they were getting okay ratings  and hits,
but nothing like the instructional videos.
A friend of mine had started posting instructional videos.  His name is
Adam Gussow [of Satan and Adam, with Sterling  "Satan" Magee]. He was also one
of my harmonica teachers. He started making  these videos and they started
going good for him, and then he started making  money off of them, asking for
donations and getting PayPal. I didn't want to do  that because I already
have a career as a performer and what I wanted to do was  attract people to
other our YouTube videos of us playing and get people out to  the shows.
I started having a lot of people at my shows who had never  ever been to a
bar to see live music before. Their favorite harmonica players  were not
guys like Little Walter or Kim Wilson or Charlie  Musselwhite; their favorite
guys were not the most popular harmonica  players. Their favorite guys were
me and Adam Gussow and Ronnie  Shellist and Christelle Berthon. Of those four
players, I'm the  only one who really plays gigs. The rest just sit at home
and maybe play locally  here and there, but they make videos, yet these
people are famous to these  people at home.
I do genuinely love the instrument, and I was trying to fill  a niche on
YouTube that I felt wasn't there. Adam's and Ronnie's videos were all  very
basic and I wanted to make a video that was more for the intermediate or
advanced guy that maybe already know some or all the stuff that those guys were
saying but was really looking for a different way of learning, not only
some of  the more advanced techniques but some more personal approaches in
terms of  musicality and training, scale exercises, and how to practice, those
kind of  more disciplined, a classical approach to learning which I felt
really lacking  from our instrument. I still feel to this day, this is the only
instrument,  harmonica, in the world where I hear people consistently saying
over and over,  "Don't practice, don't learn scales, you're going to ruin
your playing" because  they're afraid it's going to take the soul out of it.
BW: I hear a lot about young people not being attracted to  the Blues and
more of us middle-aged types go to the shows, but you could bring  in this
whole young generation through this medium.
JR: That's absolutely correct. It's been my experience  that the
demographic that I speak of that comes to these shows. They don't go to  see Blues
shows, they don't go to see other Blues harmonica players unless those  guys
are doing something, and they also feel it's cool like Jason's giving us
something for free. Let's give him something back. This is all he wants. And it
is all I want!
Then once they come to the show, they see and feel the energy  of the
music. For me it was the same thing. My mom brought me to see James  Cotton when
I was 15, and I went just to hear the harmonica. We got there  and heard the
whole thing. I fell in love with the music. It wasn't long after  that,
maybe a year, when I was playing records that had nothing to do with  harmonica
and everything to do with Blues, like Albert King and B.B.  King, Muddy
Waters, he had harp on some of his stuff, but it wasn't  why I was buying it. I
was buying it 'cause I loved the music. And getting out  to that club and
being part of that and that whole thing with the audience and  the energy of
the audience and the energy of the performer, that circle that  goes back
and forth. Once those kids experience that, they're hooked for life.  Not just
on Blues, hopefully on Blues, but also on live music and what that's  like
to go out there and see that.
BW: I think you have 80 YouTube videos posted. How many  subscribers?
JR: I think they're almost up to 3,000. I recently got  a computer that I
can take on the road, and I can film videos. So recently I've  been putting
up a lot more videos from the road. My new series of videos is  called "Ricci
Road Videos" - I go out and interview harmonica players and other
interesting people.
I think it's an exciting medium. It's free. It's also  relevant to mention
how much work it does overseas because the record companies  only reach so
far. I think Delta Groove does a decent job getting our record to  England
and Belgium and a few other countries, but the thing is I'm reaching  people
in Vietnam, I'm reaching people in Laos, people in Pakistan that  otherwise
would never hear my music.
Everybody all the time is like, "Oh man, the world is in such  rough shape.
It's falling apart." Far be it from me to have the answer, but what  I
would suggest to people is, I'm not sure that's really true. What I know is
true is that we have more access to what's going on in the world everywhere all
 at once with the click of a button. That's bad and good.
It's easy to see that there are wars everywhere and crime  everywhere.
That's always been going on. We just didn't know about it because we  didn't
have this amazing tool. And this amazing tool can also let us know what  good
things are going on all over the world. When I'm looking for information
about something, I'm almost always going to YouTube first even before Google,
because Google's just going to direct me to YouTube. If we want to figure
out  how to make brownies from scratch, you can see it. Anything you can think
of -  almost - somebody has a video up there of how to do it and tutorials
are the  most active videos viewed, because people want to feel like they
are getting  something out of their time in front of the computer.
Unfortunately, there's that whole Internet mentality where  people think
they can replace their real life experience. What they don't  understand is
that most of the people making these videos didn't learn from  them, from the
Internet. They learned from real life experience, from getting  out. The
reason we have stuff to talk about on the videos is because we had to  get this
information the hard way, and it's so much more than the information.  It's
the how do you do an overblow, how do you play a Sonny Boy solo. It's the
process of going out and performing and seeing performers and talking to
them  face to face and being six inches away from your face and blowing the
lick right  into your ear, and you going, "Oh, yeah, okay." That stuff gets in
you. The  Internet is great stuff, but it's not the answer to everything.
BW: You have mastery of playing the instrument, and then  your technical
knowledge is astounding. Where did you learn all of the technical  part of
playing?
JR: I would say I only have a rudimentary  understanding of music theory.
Compared to most harmonica players, I'm a  Julliard graduate [but] compared
to a first-year college student on any  instrument who is studying that
stuff, I am well behind them. I couldn't even  tell you how many sharps and flats
are in each key. I've learned everything with  what's called the Nashville
Number System, which is a musical shorthand still  based in theory and based
in scales, predominately based off of the C major  scale and then all forms
of shorthand are really referring to variations of  that. I have a slight
working knowledge of most chords that I come in contact  with in Blues and
some Jazz and all Rock and Folk. "Working knowledge" meaning I  can tell you
what notes those chords are composed of in numbers. I can't tell  you what
notes they are literally.
I have an understanding of most of the seven modes that exist  and what
their point is, and this may be gibberish to some of the readers, but  it's
really all rudimentary. I learned all of this knowledge by being in contact
with musicians that needed to communicate with me and had to find a way for me
 to understand what they were talking about beyond playing me the lick and
then  waiting for me to figure it out by ear.
The other thing is that I enjoy a lot of other music besides  Blues, and
from those other music genres there is less of a...well, Blues is a  largely
improvised type of music, and it's also a music that is composed of  quite a
bit of machismo, meaning that there is very little communication about  what
is going to be played prior to it being played for a variety of reasons. A
lot of white people playing that music have this idea that the older black
performers didn't communicate, they just sat down and did and that's how it
 goes. That may be true in some cases, but I find that hypothesis
disturbingly  racist.
There have been many black performers that are old and  certainly fit into
the old black Bluesman stereotype that I've hung around with  whose working
knowledge of chords and scales and chord structure is pretty  extensive, and
they were pretty smart, smarter than me, and knew more than I  did. I find
that whole idea a little racist and simplified, and again it's the  idea
that on some level knowledge is going to hurt you. There's this notion in
Blues music that knowledge will hurt you, that it will somehow make you less
soulful, that the more you know about what you're playing the less there is a
chance that you're going to play from your heart. That is absolutely
preposterous. It's not true and it's not backed up by history.
When you move into other genres of music, that communication  increases
because of the lack of that stereotype and that pretense. You don't  see that
pretense as much in Rock music; you don't see it as much in Country  music;
you certainly do not see it in Jazz music. Jazz music is an incredibly
soulful form of music, yet has performers that play all technical with no soul,
and very little technique with tons of soul, and in the middle just like
every  other form of music. But one thing that's in common with all of that is
that  Jazz players are very hip and very cool to practicing and to knowing
what's  going on behind them. There are all these people out there that would
say that  scales are bad for you and knowledge is going to hurt you and any
type of formal  training is negative.
Just tell me that Miles Davis's "Autumn Leaves" didn't  have any soul. Then
listen to it and write me an e-mail and say that solo was  overthought.
This guy's a genius, and he still plays with tons of soul and knew  everything
that he was doing, and it didn't hurt him. I love technique, and I  love
theory, and learning it isn't going to make you a great player, but not 
learning it will hurt your chances of being a great player.
This is Sarah Jeffress' first article for BluesWax.  She may be contacted
at blueswax@xxxxxxxxxxx

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